The socialist left has a long and storied romance with the idea of the general strike, also known as the mass strike. The basic premise is that capitalist society survives only by the continued participation of the working class, and therefore if a critical mass of workers across industries were to cease work all at once, they could either overthrow capitalism entirely or force enormous concessions from the capitalist class. Folk musician and Industrial Workers of the World organizer Joe Hill summed it up best in “Workers of the World, Awaken!”:

If the workers take a notion,

They can stop all speeding trains;

Every ship upon the ocean,

They can tie with mighty chains;

Every wheel in the creation,

Every mine and every mill,

Fleets and armies of the nation,

Will at their command stand still.

The general strike, though not conceived of as such, actually predates modern capitalism by millennia. Workers have withdrawn their labor en masse as an act of revolutionary defiance since at least the age of the Roman Republic. In 493 BCE, the underclass of plebeians evacuated from the city of Rome to the surrounding hills in protest of the political settlement of the revolution of sixteen years earlier, which had overthrown the monarchy in favor of an elected government but restricted political rights to the patrician upper class. This evacuation, known as the first secessio plebis or “secession of the plebes,” was a sort of ancestor of the general strike as we know it today. It worked, forcing the patricians to negotiate with the plebeians as equals and grant them political representation. Subsequent mass strikes in the following two centuries gradually forced the ruling class to cede increasing political power to the plebeians until the formal distinctions between the two classes disappeared entirely.

As modern capitalism emerged from its birth pangs in the nineteenth century, the specter of the general strike rose from its grave in the hills of Rome to once again haunt the estates of the ruling class, which now consisted of capitalists and slaveowners rather than patricians. W.E.B. DuBois has noted how the mass uprising of slaves during the American Civil War could be considered a “general strike of the slaves.” This general strike, then—still the largest in American history—struck the fatal blow that brought down the planter class. But we may find an earlier example from the United Kingdom more relevant to our circumstances in the twenty-first century. In 1842, when Parliament rejected the second People’s Charter—a petition for democratic reforms with millions of signatures—half a million workers went on strike to try to force the government to reverse course and accept the Charter’s demands. The strikers were brutally suppressed, but in the long run nearly all of the reforms they had struck for were implemented.

Despite these historical experiences, the socialist movement that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century was largely dismissive of the potential of the general strike as a means of defeating capitalism. But this attitude was not universal within the movement. Anarchists within the First International were early and vocal proponents of the general strike; the fact that they saw it as an alternative to political action was likely the main reason Marxists were so quick to dismiss the idea. With the founding of the Second International, which intentionally excluded anarchists, there was still disagreement over the value of the general strike. Though they were a minority, some socialists in the International saw it not as an alternative to the political struggle but as a tool to be deployed in it. Debates flared up now and again between the pro- and anti-general strike factions. During one such period of debate, Friedrich Engels remarked in a letter to German-American Marxist Friedrich Sorge, “I almost wish that the [Belgian socialists], who have provoked the general strike nonsense this time, will put it into practice to try to win universal suffrage.” Two years later, they did just that, but they were not, as Engels had predicted they would be, “mercilessly cut up.” The Belgian general strike of 1893—the first true general strike in Europe—won universal male suffrage in a mere six days. Still, the mood in the Second International did not begin to shift in earnest until after the Russian Revolution of 1905, which saw the most spectacular demonstration of the general strike in action to date. Nearly three million Russian workers struck that year, forcing the Tsarist government to convene an elected legislative assembly and reduce restrictions on the freedom of press and assembly. This firestorm rekindled the general strike debate in the Second International, prompting interventions like Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike and Vladimir Lenin’s Economic and Political Strikes.

In Economic and Political Strikes, Lenin defined “political strikes” as those which “concern the basic, most profound conditions of political life in the whole country” as opposed to the narrow economic interests of the workers of a single shop or trade or even of the industrial proletariat as a whole. Luxemburg argued that these strikes were the basis for the general strike, which she described in The Mass Strike as “a means, firstly, of creating the conditions of the daily political struggle.” Indeed, we can see this principle in practice in each of the previously listed examples by underscoring what they have in common. They each raised primarily political demands: expanded suffrage in the United Kingdom in 1842 and Belgium in 1893, a constitution and a parliament in Russia in 1905. Even the secessio plebis raised the demand of political representation for the plebeians. The general strike of the slaves in the United States is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. The demand that eclipsed all others was the abolition of slavery, but even still, when that demand had been won the struggle ignited by the uprising progressed to a higher political stage where the former slaves convened popular assemblies to demand equal suffrage and other political rights.

What of strikes with strictly economic demands? These are surely the most common form of strike, and many have risen to a level comparable to a general strike. But these are never “general” in the sense of the political strikes mentioned before. Philadelphia was gripped by general strikes in 1835 and 1910, New Orleans in 1892, and Seattle in 1919. Each of these revolved around principally economic demands like the ten-hour workday and wage increases, and they were all contained to their respective cities. Some of the larger strike waves motivated by economic demands could be considered a form of general strike, like the enormous textile strike that swept the East Coast and the South or the waterfront strike that swept the West Coast, both in 1934. But though these may have been an order of magnitude closer to true general strikes in scale, they were no closer in scope than the various single-city general strikes. Impressive though they were, they did not expand beyond the bounds of the industries in which they started except for sporadic solidarity strikes from unions in other trades. There are some exceptions, most notably the British general strike of 1926, when British trade unions shut down the entire economy in solidarity with miners’ demands for wage increases. But it is worth noting that the British strike of 1926 was a complete failure, while general strikes for political purposes have a remarkably successful track record.

Conditions like long hours, low wages, and poor shopfloor conditions are more intimately felt by the workers subjected to them than the “basic, most profound conditions of political life” and thus more likely to motivate those workers to strike at any given juncture. However, they are not capable of reliably bringing workers out to the picket lines from numerous different industries and geographical regions of the country, which is what makes a general strike general. The workers of any two workplaces or industries do not necessarily experience the same symptoms of economic exploitation, which manifest differently based on the interests of the particular group of capitalists exploiting them. True, all workers suffer the extraction of surplus value from their labor, but workers do not risk their livelihoods by the thousands and millions fighting abstractions, and more concrete economic grievances are endemic to certain sections of the class. On the other hand, all members of the working class across the entire country suffer from the political oppression of the capitalist state, which represents the interests of capitalists in general against workers in general, and here we can name specific grievances shared by the entire class: lack of universal and equal suffrage, police tyranny, and so on. This is why, as we have seen, general strikes have historically tended to cohere around political rather than economic demands, and when general strikes have possessed a purely economic character they have typically been brief and failed to win their demands.

It may be tempting to explain away the different fortunes of the strikes discussed here with an appeal to different local conditions. Perhaps the general strikes in Russia in 1905 and Britain in 1926 were so different because one occurred in a fundamentally revolutionary situation and the other did not, or perhaps the upheavals of 1934 in the US failed to take on a generalized character because the conditions were not ripe for a nationwide revolt of labor. Whether these diagnoses are correct or not, they do not paint the whole picture. Economic and political demands produce strikes of a different character even under comparably revolutionary circumstances. Let us examine two case studies. The Spanish general strike of 1917 and the Italian biennio rosso (“red two years”) of 1919-1920 both occurred in the context of a global revolutionary wave which consumed Europe and North America around the end of World War I. Both countries faced political instability, economic turmoil, and the rapid growth of radical labor organizations like the syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and USI (Italian Syndicalist Union). In Spain, the PSOE (Socialist Workers’ Party) called a joint general strike with the CNT in protest of the collapsing regime, demanding a complete reconstitution of the government into a republic. The strike quickly enveloped the nation, shutting down almost all major industries. Though it was ultimately suppressed without achieving its aims, it mobilized a large section of the Spanish working class behind the socialist program. In the general election the following year, five times as many PSOE candidates won as in the previous election, including four imprisoned strike leaders who had to be released by the government so they could take their seats. All in all, the strike was a tactical defeat but a resounding strategic victory. In Italy, a movement of strikes and workplace occupations emerged organically, but instead of intervening to raise political demands, the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) tailed the existing movement and continued to raise demands for better wages and hours, workers’ control of factories, and expropriation of farmland. While the uprising took on a general character in the northern regions of Italy, it failed to expand into the impoverished south. Ultimately, it petered out after two years of disoriented unrest, giving way to the frenzied bloodletting of the “blackshirts,” paramilitaries who terrorized workers and peasants on behalf of employers. Led by Benito Mussolini, the blackshirts took power and installed a fascist regime within two years of the end of the biennio rosso. The Italian general strike was a resounding defeat both tactically and strategically.

It may seem premature to dissect the anatomy of a general strike at a time when the socialist and labor movements are so underdeveloped in the United States. But the question of what makes a general strike successful is not one we can wait to settle on the picket lines. Years of diligent agitation and organization will be required before a general strike is plausible in this country, and the form the general strike of the future will take is a function of our agitational and organizational methods in the present. We must realize that, although the struggle for economic demands is the glue that holds labor unions together, to deploy these unions as instruments of nationwide revolutionary struggle requires that socialists consciously intervene to raise political demands linking the universal class interests of workers to the struggle against the capitalist state. A general strike for, say, a higher minimum wage might draw the support of millions of workers, but would struggle to mobilize millions more who already earn above whatever the proposed new minimum might be. As it comes into its own, the socialist movement might find the general strike more useful as a protest against the government’s refusal to allow elected socialists to take their seats (a problem the old Socialist Party encountered multiple times), or as a weapon to force the nullification of a reactionary Supreme Court ruling, or even the wholesale abolition of the Court or other undemocratic institutions like the Senate. When politics descends to the streets and takes insurrectionary dimensions, as it did in 2020 with the uprisings against police terror, the socialist movement may use the general strike as a means of sharpening the crisis and establishing the leadership of the militant working class over the movement. Finally, in the decisive hour of the battle for democracy, when the socialist party stands poised to provoke a constitutional crisis and in so doing pave the way for the democratic workers’ republic, the general strike may be the surest means of dispersing the legitimacy of the ruling-class Constitution and enforcing the counter-legitimacy of the organized working class. That is, it would be the opening salvo of the revolution.

This is more than mere fantasy—the potential for a general strike is brewing, although there is a long way to go before that potential may be transformed into anything more. During the government shutdown of 2018-2019, president Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants called for a general strike to force a resolution. Radical unions have begun testing the waters with explicitly political strikes, like the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s shutdown of the port of Oakland in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in 2020. Economic strikes are proliferating, too, with consecutive increases in annual strike activity in recent years and notable flare-ups like the “Striketober” strike wave of 2022. With the Teamsters gearing up for a contract fight with UPS and the United Auto Workers preparing for their own with the “Big Three” automobile manufacturers, an even larger strike wave is a distinct possibility this summer. To lay the groundwork for an eventual revolutionary general strike, the socialist movement must do the following: unify around a minimum program of political demands designed to bring the working class to power in a democratic republic, establish an active presence in labor unions to help steer the labor movement in a revolutionary direction, and merge the day-to-day economic battles of these unions with the epochal war for political power.